In a pre-dawn raid, the US just conducted a missile strike at the airport in Baghdad that killed General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds force and the head of the Iraqi militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.  Internatonal crude prices are up sharply in the last hour on rumors of war with Iran.

Strap in.  Trump’s trying to start a war with Iran to distract from his problems at home.

Yesterday, Trump tweeted out a photograph of an Iranian launchpad after an explosion of a rocket occurred there.  Civilian satellites had taken photos after the incident but they were fuzzy, difficult to make out detail.  Trump’s photo was highly detailed with notes on it showing buildings and vehicles and was clearly taken by one of unknown US intelligence satellites orbiting earth.  A US intelligence official confirmed late yesterday that indeed the photo is from US intelligence.  Here’s the tweet:

So, let’s be clear about what just happened – the President of the United States, who had just received an intelligence briefing using photos from a classified US spy satellite took a photograph of that classified photo and tweeted it out to 62 million followers for the sole purpose of trolling Iran.

Can you imagine the fire storm over at Fox Noise had Obama done anything nearly as stupid?  At what point does the CIA and NSA stop giving Trump classified briefings?  At what point do they take away the nuclear codes? At what point does Mitch McConnell grow a spine and stop this guy?  When is enough enough?

Never?

We all remember it – the time that the most respected member of the Bush II administration, sat before the UN’s Security Council blatantly lying about the fake evidence of Iraqi WMDs that didn’t exist.  Colin Powell permanently stained his impeccable reputation by carrying Dick Cheney’s water to invade a sovereign nation just because.  As is well documented now, too little and too late, Cheney and company lied their asses off for months to whip up a case against Saddam Hussein, to justify a full-fledged invasion which continues to destabilize the Middle East to this day.

The War Based on Lies killed over 4,000 American lives, maimed over 30,000, and created an entire generation of veterans with PTSD, and other mental problems.  This is not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis murdered on their own soil.  Trillions of US tax dollars were spent doing that, and we’re still paying today for a terrible result.  These thousands of people and trillions of dollars paid for Bush II’s re-election in 2004.

Trump and his enablers are doing exactly the same thing again, except this time they don’t have a Colin Powell to lie us into war.  There’s no one in this criminal administration who hasn’t already sacrificed their own reputations and careers and the altar of Trump Loyalty.  Mike Pompeo made the rounds of Sunday talk shows yesterday beating the war drums and miserably failed to make a case that passed the straight faced test.  He presented not one shred of evidence beyond the grainy video of an unidentified boat alongside an unidentified ship doing an unidentified activity.  It looked just like the manure that Powell shoveled in 2003 to the UN. The others banging the war drums all wrecked what little reputation they had last time around and have no credibility this time around.  John Bolton comes to mind as the poster child for lying us into war.

I’m no genius, but I knew from the very first moment that Bush and company were lying in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.  I’m seeing exactly the same thing right now.  Trump is lying.  Pompeo is lying.  They’re all lying to get us into a war because that is Trump’s only chance for re-election.  Let’s not give him that opportunity.

We all know that John Bolton hates everyone and everything Iranian.  He desperately tried to get GWB to bomb Tehran back to the stone age, but still licking his wounds from his folly in Iraq, even HE wasn’t stupid enough to fall for Bolton’s bullshit on Iran.

Well, Bolton’s got a president now who is remarkably more stupid that GWB, so it’s Deja Vu all over again, and this time Trump IS stupid enough to go along with him.  Even while he denies he’s planning on sending in 120,000 troops into the Middle East, the defense department is planning on…sending 120,000 troops to the Middle East.  As we talked about yesterday, he’s already moved a carrier battle group into the region, and B-52 bombers are being staged into the area.

Now the State Department has ordered the consulates in Iraq be evacuated.  US central command in the Middle East has troops on high alert citing threats from Syria and Iran.  The problem, though, is that no one outside of the US government sees ANY increased threat from Iran.  In fact, the senior British officer in the coalition anti-terrorism operation in the Middle East confirms there is no increased threat; Trump responded to his comments as “fake news”.

In 2002, I was highly skeptical of all the bullshit that Bush/Cheney was peddling to whip up a war with Saddam Hussein.  Nothing they said made any sense, and there was NO evidence that Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.  This drumbeat to war feels the same to me.  No one with the government has given ANY evidence that Iran or Syria are doing anything that is more threatening that their normal hostility.  Because of these circumstances, I’m going to continue calling bullshit on Trump and call this what it is – Wagging the Dog to win the next election.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Remember when Trump kept repeating the lie that Barack Obama was going to start a war with Iran to get re-elected in 2012?  Here it is:

Later, when he decided to run for the office, Trump released continuous Twitter salvos of all kinds of lies and taunts, but the Iran theme was a common one.

One thing we’ve learned from Trump (and other Republicans, BTW) is that when he accuses someone of doing something vile, he’s doing that very thing.  Now, with his polls in the tank and still going down, Trump is so desperate that he’ll try anything to get re-elected and stay out of jail for a while longer.  As we’ve discussed before, Trump is even trying to get impeached so he can cast himself as a “victim” of the big, bad, Democrats.  Since that’s not working, his next stunt is doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing – starting a war with Iran.  What’s really scary is that he’s got Iran hater, John Bolton, continually whispering in his ear achieve his ultimate dream of bombing the crap out of Iran.

Trump’s already moved a carrier battle group and Air Force bombers to the Middle East to “counter Iran’s threat”, and now, Bolton is pushing for deploying 120,000 US troops to the Middle East.  The drumbeats of war for politics are now being heard, even as Pompeo and Bolton whip up fears of Iran, just in time for the 2020 election.  The only real threat we have is allowing Trump another 4 years in the WH.

Okay, I’m as confused as a billy goat on Astroturf.

Are we going to war with Mexico, Iran, Australia, or UC Berkley?

I suppose it’s only fair that Trump told President Peña Nieto that he has “bad hombres” in his country because in Mexico they say we have El Presidente del Inferno.

And I have to tell you that it takes a real special kind of goofy to get into a fight with the Prime Minister of Australia.  Somebody show Trump a map so he can see that China is an obvious trading partner with them. And they need stuff. Shuddup.

I’m guess I’m glad we put Iran on notice. I dunno, though, because I have no idea what “on notice” means. Are we gonna make them cry us a river or something?

And we’re going to cut federal funding to UC Berkley because after hours of peaceful demonstrations some damfool guys showed up and got violent?

We don’t even know who these guys are.  They may be Trump supporters trying to cause trouble.  Look, the speaker they were protesting, Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, has been banned from Twitter for cyber-bullying.  Not even Trump has been banned from Twitter for cyber-bullying.

Look, you don’t punish a whole institution for the actions of a few.  I hope Iran, Mexico, and Australia know that, too.